Donald Trump v Kamala Harris: who’s leading the polls?

Last updated on October 15th 2024

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The race for the White House is in its last weeks. Early voting has begun in several states, including key battlegrounds like Arizona and Georgia. The two major-party candidates, Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-president, and Donald Trump, the Republican former president, are criss-crossing the country, scrambling to raise funds and motivate voters.
We track polls from across the country and synthesise them to measure the state of the race. Since she took over the Democratic nomination from Joe Biden, Ms Harris’s standing has risen steadily. She has led Mr Trump by about three points nationally since August. But the American election is not decided by the popular vote. Our prediction model runs the numbers to assess whether this lead will be enough to put Ms Harris in the White House.

Our latest coverage of the race

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The polls have been fairly steady despite an intense and eventful campaign. Mr Trump, the first convicted felon to seek the White House, has faced two deplorable attempts on his life: at a rally in Pennsylvania and at his own golf course in Florida. Ms Harris, for her part, showed up the former president in their only debate and enjoys a swingeing financial advantage. Yet, weighed down by the Biden administration’s legacy, she has struggled to pull away from Mr Trump.
Both campaigns are light on policy—in part by design, but also because their policy differences are smaller than they appear. But the contrast between Ms Harris, the cheerful former prosecutor, and Mr Trump, who still faces more serious charges over his alleged participation in a scheme to overturn his loss in the 2020 election, remains sharp.
The Economist is tracking the race. As well as an average of the polls, you can also see historic polling data for Mr Biden and Mr Trump, more recent polling since Ms Harris entered the contest, and key dates in the race and candidate biographies. Stay informed with our weekday newsletter, The US in brief.

Voting intention, %

Note: polls appear according to the last day on which they surveyed voters
Editor’s note (Oct 14th): We have adjusted our tracker methodology to reduce the weight of repeat daily tracking surveys, to increase the weight of the most recent surveys and to dampen the effect of outliers. These tweaks resulted in small retroactive changes in our estimates.

Key dates

Jul 15th, Republican National Convention
A four-day pageant, the Republicans formally selected their presidential and vice-presidential candidates in Milwaukee.
Aug 19th, Democratic National Convention
As at the Republican convention a month earlier, the Democrats formally nominated their presidential candidate in Chicago.
Sep 10th, second presidential debate
The two main candidates went head to head on ABC News a week after Labor Day (traditionally when Americans begin to pay attention to the election). They exchanged personal attacks and sparred over their visions for America, but Ms Harris forced Mr Trump on the defensive by bringing up the former president’s legal woes and stance on abortion.
Nov 5th, election day
Polls open on a Tuesday in early November, though early voting and mail-in ballot initiatives will mean many Americans will have already voted. Counting ballots will go on for weeks in some states.
Jan 6th 2025, results certification
Once all votes are counted, the results must be certified by Congress. Normally a pro-forma event, in 2021 Mr Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol building to stop the certification. He is on trial for his alleged role in the attack.
Jan 20th 2025, inauguration
The new president will be sworn into office on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, DC.

The candidates

Kamala Harris

Vice-president

At 59, Ms Harris is more than two decades younger than Joe Biden, whom she replaced as the Democratic nominee. Her mother was an endocrinologist born in India; her father is an economist born in Jamaica. In California she won elections as a prosecutor by leaning to the right on criminal-justice issues, while also appealing to Democrats, and was elected as the state’s attorney-general in 2010. Since she came to Washington, first as a senator in 2017, Ms Harris has been most effective at debates and hearings, where her skills as a litigator are on display.

She is a creature of institutional politics, not a visionary or an ideologue, and has struggled to define herself on a national stage. Her presidential run in 2020 crashed badly. As vice-president she is tied to the Biden administration’s record, which is unpopular despite the major legislation it passed to onshore chip manufacturing and invest in green energy. If she is to beat Mr Trump she will need to answer his attack lines on immigration directly and lay out a more ambitious domestic policy agenda than Mr Biden was able to communicate.

Donald Trump

Former president

Mr Trump’s extraordinary campaign follows his no less remarkable term as America’s 45th president, which concluded shortly after his supporters staged a violent attack on the Capitol. His alleged role in instigating the attack and a broader effort to overturn results of the 2020 election resulted in two criminal indictments, in federal court and Georgia state court. A judge he appointed dismissed a further felony indictment against him, though prosecutors are appealing. The 78-year-old denies all wrongdoing. Mr Trump is a billionaire who made (and lost) much of his money in real estate, before he became a reality-TV star. This time his campaign pairs familiar culture-war issues (building a border wall, “left-wing gender insanity”) with fresh grievances (against the lawyers prosecuting his cases and the judges overseeing them).

On July 13th a gunman shot Mr Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, grazing the former president’s ear but otherwise leaving him unharmed (a bystander was killed). Afterwards Mr Trump briefly seemed a changed candidate, trying to present himself as a unifier in a speech at the Republican convention in Milwaukee. But he went back to his past ways quickly, throwing insults at his political opponents.

Methodology

To build our poll tracker, we adapted the work of political scientists Simon Jackman and Luke Mansillo, of the University of Sydney, and Jack Bailey, of the University of Manchester. Their approach treats each poll as an imperfect estimate of some “true” support for each candidate. A statistical model is used to estimate the “true” voting intention, given recent polls. The model takes into account differences in methodology between polls and the partisan tilt of individual polling firms’ output.

For the purposes of estimating characteristics such as pollster-level biases, our tracker incorporates surveys that included Donald Trump and Joe Biden up until July 21st, when Mr Biden withdrew from the election. However, it bases its estimate of the race between Mr Trump and Kamala Harris solely on polls conducted after that date. The discontinuity visible on July 21st reflects the change in the Democratic nominee.

In cases where a pollster releases multiple results on the same day, we prefer polls which exclude third parties. Third-party support tends to decline as the election approaches, partly because they may not appear on the ballot in many states. We also prefer surveys of “likely voters”, rather than “registered voters” or all adults. This is to capture election-day dynamics and the importance of turnout in American elections.

Sources: FiveThirtyEight; YouGov; national polls; The Economist